The Moneyless Man (14 page)

By the middle of February, people had stopped calling me so much. This was interesting; for months I’d received text messages and missed calls that I was unable to reply to. People who knew I was living without money, especially journalists, nonetheless often asked me to phone back, which was frustrating. How they expected me to, I’ve no idea! My lack of response eventually made me something of a forgotten man. I told myself it wasn’t through any conscious decision to ignore me, but because I could no longer remind people that I didn’t see every week that I was still alive. At least, I hoped that was why!

Between the media interest calming down and the longer days as winter faded away, the problem began to sort itself out. The toughest part of the year was over. I was really looking forward to spending less time putting on and taking off my galoshes, and more time lying under a tree with a book; to cycling in daylight and to the sense of new life and freshness that we experience when spring arrives!

In the past, I’d never really noticed the change of the seasons; living in a city disables your ways of reading the signs of such an extraordinary evolution. But living among nature makes you much more aware of her idiosyncrasies. There is definite magic in the change of a season, in the same way the first glimpse of the sun over the horizon signifies the end of night and the break of day. I can pinpoint the exact moment I felt winter was over.

It was the second to last Thursday of February, seven days after the last of the snow had melted. I found myself, for no apparent reason, waking up even happier than usual. About 7.15am, as I was reading, a ray of the sun burst through a gap in my curtains and I heard a beautiful little song just outside my window. Before long, this had become the most tremendous choir; I felt the birds had spent the winter practicing just for me. Later that morning, I walked outside without galoshes for the first time since I began
my experiment. I even contemplated losing the t-shirt and getting into shorts. And only one week earlier, my trailer had been covered in snow.

Walking around the farm I saw flowers in bloom; snowdrops, rhododendrons and daffodils – for me the embodiment of spring – were showing their faces. But I was concerned to see the cardamine (lady’s smock) and euphorbia also coming out; flowers you wouldn’t usually expect to see before March. I’ve noticed them arriving slightly earlier every year since spring 2005. In nature, a few weeks is a long time; this trend to earlier flowering is an indicator of a changing climate.

For the first time since I had begun, that night I cooked my dinner after six o’clock without having to use my wind-up flashlight. The thought of things getting easier was fantastic. I felt completely renewed by the thought of the longer, warmer days ahead, but what excited me most was the start of a new food season. I do love winter vegetables, especially pumpkin, celeriac, purple-sprouting broccoli, turnip, rutabaga, carrots, and parsnips. And what Irishman doesn’t love a potato? These crops are earthy, heavy, and warming on a cold winter’s evening. But it was spring, and I could sense the life and energy coming back into my body.

I wanted food that matched my new needs. I didn’t want to blast the nutritional value out of my food by cooking it at high temperatures. I craved raw food. Luckily for me, spring is the start of the raw food season in Britain; unless you are happy to eat imported food during the winter, it really isn’t very possible then. Now I had wild watercress, wild garlic, cucumbers, and salads like lettuce and arugula coming through. Life tasted fantastic again. It’s lucky that nature supplies us with this extra energy at the beginning of March, as spring is one of the busiest times of the year when you live off the land. One of the first and most important jobs is to get the wood in.

Stocking up on firewood isn’t the first job most people think of when they think of what needs doing in spring. You’re leaving the cold weather behind and the wood burning stove gets to take a well-deserved vacation.

But just as you don’t have food in the fall if you don’t plant seeds in the spring, you won’t have a warm home if you don’t fell and store wood before the hot summer months. For wood to burn well, it must be seasoned. When you fell a tree, the wood contains a lot of water, as you know if you pick up a fresh log. Leaving it to dry through the spring and the summer means you’ll have some really decent firewood in the fall. If I’d been certain that I would return to my old life in the city once my moneyless year was over, I wouldn’t have bothered. I wouldn’t need the wood there, as there are strict regulations about burning it in cities. But at the start of the spring, I had no idea whether I was going to continue living without money if I made it to end of November, so I applied the precautionary principle and got it in regardless.

Because the winter months had been so hectic, I’d neglected my wood-chopping activities and didn’t really get started until late February. The farm where I volunteered had an overgrown piece of land that hadn’t been looked after properly for years. It had plenty of trees overdue for felling and coppicing, meaning ample amounts of wood for me. I went on to the Toolshare scheme on the Freeconomy Community website and borrowed some tools. The people who lent them to me were more than happy to share, but I felt slightly uncomfortable. Most people who borrow tools know that if anything happens they can buy new ones. I didn’t have that luxury, so I was paranoid about damaging my borrowed tools. However, it did mean I looked after them really well.

The tools I needed depended on what wood I was coppicing and the stage of growth it was at. Coppicing involves cutting down young tree stems to almost ground level, which, as well as giving you some wood immediately, encourages new shoots to sprout. For hazel and other young re-growth, billhooks (a traditional hand tool similar to a machete but with a hook at the end) were the fastest and neatest implement to use. Loppers (scissors on the end of a long pole) and a pruning saw were good for smaller stems and on older coppice I found a bow saw worked best. I managed to get all these from Freeconomy members in Bristol and Bath.

My first job each morning was to get my tools together and select the trees I felt were the best to cut back. This was my favorite part of the day. The rising sun peeped its face over the eastern horizon of the valley a bit earlier each morning, thawing the light frost that carpeted the hills I roamed. The birds engaged in a singing contest, each trying to outdo the other. And the rabbits realized that
Homo sapiens
had woken up and wisely scampered out of my vegetable patch to the safety of the hedges. Little did they know I was vegan.

Cutting down trees has, rightly enough, a terrible reputation. Humanity is chopping them down at an alarming rate at a time when we need more, in order to absorb the growing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But using your own fuel, grown a few feet from your home, is a much greener source of heating than piping it from Norway or transporting it from wartorn, distant, or fragile countries. We don’t only need to reduce food miles to avert the worst effects of climate chaos – we also need to start thinking about fuel miles.

Once the wood had hit the ground, usually before lunch, my next job was to chop it up into smaller pieces, to enable it to season more quickly. Different woods (except ash, which you can burn immediately) take different lengths of time to dry out, but a
year is enough for most. I didn’t have this luxury. With my supplies almost exhausted, I needed to have some ready within six months or I’d have a really cold end to my year. After splitting it with an axe, I took as much as I could into my trailer, where I stacked it next to the wood burning stove, giving it a chance to dry inside during the last few months of cold weather. The rest I covered with a tarp, waiting for the summer sunshine to dry it. Every day, I took wood from under the tarp to replace the wood I had burned the evening before.

It was incredible how quickly the snow of January faded from my memory. I adored my days out gathering wood, which took me the best part of the last two weeks of February. For the first time in my life, I’d gone topless wood-chopping on Valentine’s Day. Unfortunately for me (but fortunately for them), the only females around were eating grass in a nearby pasture. Claire had presumed I would be too busy to want to do anything. There is something about chopping wood that resonates with something primitive, but still very alive, deep inside. My female friends told me it was a male thing, a deep-rooted need to provide for our partners. Maybe, but after just three months of living without money, things weren’t going very well for me on that front.

When I tell people that I live without money, the first things that spring to their mind are the physical challenges. However, they are only half the battle. I undertook the year not only to see if I could cope in a ‘bushcraft survivor’ type of way, but also to find how it felt, personally and emotionally, to live without money. And to be honest, it was very challenging, especially at the beginning.

Just before I’d started the year, I’d begun going out with
Claire. She was very supportive of what I was doing, but not looking to do it herself, partly because she had just begun a degree in Environmental Geography and needed to pay her way through that. She knew before we started going out that I was going to have a really busy year and she was happy to work with that. Practice, however, is always much more difficult than theory. The demands of moneyless living, coupled with the media interest, meant I was constantly busy. If I wasn’t doing the things that living without money calls for, I was writing or talking about them. And my decision not to get into motorized vehicles for the rest of the year didn’t help.

That decision, in many respects, was ridiculous. Claire often took her dogs for a walk along the coast. This was about forty miles away, well outside my cycling range. But she was going there anyway; the reasonable thing would have been to go with her and have a beautiful day together. However, I felt I needed to make a statement about oil, especially to those closest to me, and it would have been hard for people to take my stance seriously if I’d continued to use oil myself. Understandably, this put a strain on our relationship. She thought I was going overboard and maybe she was right. But I felt I had to stay true to my ideals.

Before we knew it, the little petty arguments, often an indicator of bigger problems, were happening. We cared about each other, and she supported the way of life I was trying to promote, but the realities of going out with someone who has given up most material possessions didn’t quite match the romantic illusion, especially for someone who needed to keep one foot in the ‘normal’ monetary system. The pressures spring put on my time were greater than ever. The weeds suddenly came back to life exactly when I wanted to plant my seeds. So, in the middle of April, Claire and I decided to break up. It was painful for a while, as every split is. Days I should have spent
planting the seeds for my summer’s harvest, I frittered away feeling sorry for myself and questioning whether I should pack it all in, sacrifice some of my ideals and have long, lazy weekends in bed with a girl I loved. But being moneyless helped me get over it more quickly than normal; I knew that unless I started breaking sweat again, I wouldn’t have much fresh produce to pick after June.

This highlighted one of the ironies of my life. I spend most of my time doing stuff for people I never meet, let alone who care for me. Then I neglect those who are dearest to me, because I am too busy with the other stuff. How do you balance your responsibilities to those you deeply, personally, love and care for (who you can usually count on your two hands), while simultaneously trying to do your best for the people and the planet that’s negatively affected by the way we live here in the West?

Breaking up in the middle of spring brought other issues. Summer is a time of romance, a time to spend the long, light evenings with a partner. I was back on the market with one of the worst lonely hearts ads you could possibly imagine:

How I live my life raises some very personal dilemmas. I’ve chosen this way of life for myself, but will a potential partner still be interested if I decide I want to carry on? It can be pretty hard to find someone you adore at the best of times. Vegetarians, vegans and locavores (people who only eat food grown within a defined radius of their home), who decide to go out only with those who eat a similar diet, know how much this decision narrows down the list of potential partners. How much worse might it be if you are looking forward to a life without money? I often joke about it, but I would be lying if I didn’t acknowledge it weighed on my mind from time to time. Even moneyless people want to fall in love!

And as if things weren’t hard enough, my old chat-up line had become obsolete. In the past, if I was attracted to someone, I’d ask them out for a drink and we’d go for a glass of wine or a cup of tea or coffee. But I hadn’t yet brewed any alcohol and as I couldn’t hit the local coffeehouse for a double espresso, a cup of freshly-picked wild tea was the only thing on the drinks list for any girl I wanted to impress.

Spring is a great time for foraged tea. My favorite has to be nettle and cleaver tea, as much because they both grow beside my front doorstep as for the taste. They make a fantastic brew, packed full of nutrition and anti-oxidants, high in iron, potassium and magnesium, and with traces of other minerals.